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So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood,
the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what Principle?
Identity with what God?
The question is substantially this: how far does purification
dispel the two orders of passion- anger, desire and the like,
with grief and its kin- and in what degree the disengagement from
the body is possible.
Disengagement means simply that the soul withdraws to its own
place.
It will hold itself above all passions and affections. Necessary
pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only
for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it
may combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease
it by refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check:
the suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at
worst the Soul will never itself take fire but will keep the
involuntary and uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare and
weak at that. The Soul has nothing to dread, though no doubt the
involuntary has some power here too: fear therefore must cease,
except so far as it is purely monitory. What desire there may be
can never be for the vile; even the food and drink necessary for
restoration will lie outside of the Soul's attention, and not
less the sexual appetite: or if such desire there must be, it
will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely
under control; or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it will
reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting
fancy.
The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to
set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or if
that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent
assault, so that any wound it takes may be slight and be healed
at once by virtue of the Soul's presence, just as a man living
next door to a Sage would profit by the neighbourhood, either in
becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never
venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove.
There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of
Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of
Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will
grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and
still in the presence of its lord.
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